Horn a Plenty

 

QUESTION: I’ve always been fascinated by antique items made of horn. I see them in cases at antique shows all the time. I’ve even purchased a hair comb or two and a walking stick with a horn handle. But I have no idea how these items were produced. I assume most of them were made in the 19th century, but I’m only guessing. Can you give me some insight into the production of products from cow’s horn.

ANSWER: Horn has long been used to make various utilitarian objects. Ancient people blew through it to call meetings and such. Other horns held gun powder for muskets. And ornate hair combs made of horn were all the rage in Victorian times.

Long before synthetic materials like Celluloid, Bakelite,  and Lucite came on the scene,  Mother Nature provided an interesting assortment of moldable organic materials. These unique substances from plants and animals are known as "natural plastics."

Thermoplastics are materials that are made pliable by the application of heat, then molded with pressure or by casting in a cold mold. Additional applications of heat will subsequently re-soften thermoplastics and distort the original molded shape of an object. Though many modern thermoplastics are recyclable, antique thermoplastics can be permanently damaged by heat. Testing methods, such as exposure to hot water and the ever-popular hot pin test, can ruin valuable antique objects that are very often irreplaceable. So caution should be taken when trying to identify the materials from which some antique molded items are made.

Collectors seek objects fashioned from natural thermoplastic materials like cow horn in the 18th and 19th centuries. Over time, people used horn for a .variety of useful and ornamental applications. It required persistence and hard work to understand its unique properties. Through trial and error, ingenuity and luck, horn smiths developed successful fabricating techniques for working with horn.

Horn is a form of a protein called keratin, the same type of material as in fish scales, bird feathers, human hair and fingernails. Tiny compressed hair-like fibers, which can be seen with a magnifying glass, make up the structure of ' horn. Because of its unique protein formation, horn frays easily and has a tendency to split and crack during fabrication, making it difficult to work with. 

Horn smiths harvested, cleaned and fabricated horn into a variety of useful and ornamental objects such as dressing combs, hair ornaments, buttons, jewelry, decorative inlaid frames, trinket and snuffboxes. Because of Its beautiful pale translucent quality, they used horn extensively during the Edwardian Era for producing Art Nouveau accessories that depicted the dragon fly motif. 

Horn was a plentiful by-product of the meat and leather industries. It had been used for centuries n its raw state to make objects like powder horns and for fashioning common utilitarian items such as serving spoons and shoehorns. Oxen, steer and cow horn ranged in color from pale cream to light mottled gray. Buffalo horn, obtained from India, Thailand, and China, was dark brown. Domestic cattle horn vas plentiful and ranged in color tones from pale grayish green to streaked dark brown.

Manufacturers used raw cattle horn to make pressed rattans, umbrella and utensil handles, jewelry items and dressing combs. But Before these finished products could reach consumers, they had to first be fabricated. This process actually began with the meat industry.

Slaughterhouses had a surplus of raw cattle horn, which they stockpiled into various sizes and colors. This they sold cheaply to manufacturing companies or merchants who were in the business of applying horn to fabricators. A representative from the fabricating company would carefully select horn for specialty items like ornamental hair combs. Some representatives traveled the world searching for fine horn. When color wasn’t a consideration, the horn went for making common utilitarian objects like utensil handles or buttons.

After sorting, fabricators prepared the raw horn for the first step in processing. Workers trimmed the ends away by means of sawing two cross cuts—the first called the "head" or "rootº cut and the second the "screw" or "tip" cut. They then gathered the tips  to make utensil handles and buttons and used the ragged edges of the head cut to produce fertilizer.

They then sent the trimmed horn to the "opening department" where they soaked it with water and heated it over an open fire until it became softened. Another method commonly employed by fabricators involved softening the trimmed horn in huge vats of hot water or oil.

Nevertheless, once sufficiently pliable, the horn was ready to be split open. In order to prevent waste and in an attempt to end up with a rectangular piece of material, workers made an elongated, spiral cut beginning from the widest part of the horn up through the narrow section. After slitting, they forced the  horn open using tongs, and then placed it between screw plates to flattened it.

Fabricators often performed special finishing techniques on raw horn to change its appearance. They frequently clarified and sometimes stained it. The clarifying process involved squeezing the cleaned and flattened material between heated and oiled iron plates under tremendous pressure until it became translucent. Lantern makers used clarified horn, which had a slight greenish hue, as a "glaze" instead of glass in lanterns throughout the 18º and 19" centuries. Another use for ultra thin, translucent sheets of horn was to layer them between the pages of important documents in order to protect them from damage caused by bleeding inks. But the most important application of clarified horn was in the production of fancy ornamental hair combs.

Horn smiths stained clarified horn to resemble expensive tortoiseshell by first exposing it to diluted nitric acid which turned it a pale yellow. Once they achieved the desired amber color, they sprinkled and streaked the horn with a mixture of caustic soda, litharge, or lead monoxide, and dragon's blood, a colored resin derived from the rattan palm. This solution reacted with the nitric acid in the treated horn and turned the affected areas orange. The end result was a mottled imitation of tortoiseshell in mellow shades of amber and orange. Records show that in the late 1880s the comb factory of Stewart & Company of  Aberdeen, Scotland, used 3.5 million horns to only 600 pounds of authentic tortoiseshell per year.

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